Once?  No, many times upon a time.
In this Kingdom of Euphemism,
I'm not in a hurry to get where I'm going.
Keeping an appointment with the Maker of Appointments,
I agreed to be a calendar.
Existence is a crisis.
What I call you matters so much less than what you are.
Whatsoever you display shall be destroyed.
How long you will stand.  How quickly you will fall.
Stupidity isn't improved by greater saturation
through the population.
You shall not dictate to me the level of specificity.
Salacious specificity is infectious, contagious.
There was no hope of sanity after puberty.
I'd make a suggestion if I thought you'd listen.
What I most want punished are stupidity and hostility;
self-monstrification, a cunning credulity
resplendent in decadent cadences.
The man in the VR mask, pouring Morpheus
into one mold after another, trying to form Proteus.
It is no whim that compels me to defend whimsy.
What are your unintentions, they asked, irascible
minuscules proffering impossible propositions to palliate
the pain of the plan to unravel perfection and knit satisfaction.
I have impregnated you with bees.
There is too much data now, too much being generated,
to take one idea at a time, in order.
Distributed cognition across multiple ontologies.
In the Land of Impossibility, the Merely Unlikely is king.
What is needed is a different way of thinking about thinking,
to reverse the polarity of the temporal imperative.
I would like to hold the entirety of my life in my mind at once,
and reserve time to alter the direction of my attention.
But a constant is an instant misperceived of the infinite.
We will give you 8 billion people, they say,
but we will take away the opportunity
to make meaningful connections between them.
The connections.  The interactions.  The dependencies.
No one has ever loved anyone enough to make them love them.
Some are for the sunless sea, and some the sealess sun.
An immoderate immersion in mercurial mandates.
Errors in eros erased—oh, the ease of shaming a Freudian!
The most terrible society is the one in which you have to be
what others tell you are.
And the closer one is to that, the worse it is.
There are so many conspiracy theories about the suspicious
lack of conspiracies.
And this idea that those who say something differently
say something different.
The lost masterpiece of the Unknown Genius.
The Cultural Renovation.
The dumbing down,
the enshittification,
the monetization of,
the rejection of fact,
the intolerance.
We long to feel responsible for something, as if that tethers us to the world.
And though I have resisted, I have resisted joining the resistance.
I stand a bit apart, wearing a baseball cap that says "KARMA IS FASCISM."
I prefer counterclockwise everywhere but on the clock.
Again and again we hear the accusation of the Unrecognized Saint,
who said "I am" when we said "You ain't."
It is art's uncertainty that makes it an antidote to life's inexorable poison.
Consciousness is analogous to the way the brain
makes light out of the darkness of sleep.
How can we get better at witnessing endings?
At the end of our lives, they should carry us to the awards ceremony,
and then to the reading of the list of indictments.
It's not that I needed to know where the journey would go;
it's that it needed to be going somewhere.